Development History
The 11-member RoboSUST team has been working on various robotics projects since its formation. The SUSTU project marked the team’s first attempt at developing a humanoid robot. SUSTU was capable of writing its name on paper and following demonstrated directions.
The Bangladesh Science Fiction Society funded the humanoid robot to represent the organization at the annual Science Fiction Festival. Following this, the team began intensive development work in November. Leveraging this experience, the team successfully unveiled Bangladesh’s first social humanoid robot, named RIBO.
RIBO has 24 degrees of freedom and is designed as an upper-torso humanoid robot. It incorporates a range of interactive features, including dancing, facial expressions, handshaking, raising and lowering hands on command, maintaining eye contact during interaction, engaging in conversations in Bengali, responding to its name, and recognizing human facial expressions such as sadness, joy, and neutral emotion.
Design
RIBO is an upper-torso humanoid robot designed to interact with people. It features 24 degrees of freedom and runs on a Core 2 Duo processor with 6 GB of RAM, along with an additional processor dedicated to hardware control. The robot operates on both Ubuntu and Windows-based operating systems.
These operating systems support the robot’s multimedia components, including cameras, a microphone array with RGB and depth sensing, and audio processing hardware. The Kinect microphone array is used for 3D sound localization. RIBO employs text-to-speech synthesis to generate its robotic voice.
A touch sensor mounted on the right hand allows RIBO to detect when a person grabs its hand. Cameras embedded in the eyeballs provide depth perception, enhancing realism during interaction. The eyelids enable natural blinking, while the eyebrows are used to express different facial emotions. Facial gesture recognition is achieved using a support vector machine classifier.
